Fail2ban

Warning: Using an IP blacklist will stop trivial attacks but it relies on an additional daemon and successful logging (the partition containing /var can become full, especially if an attacker is pounding on the server). Additionally, if the attacker knows your IP address, they can send packets with a spoofed source header and get you locked out of the server. SSH keys provide an elegant solution to the problem of brute forcing without these problems.

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address.

Hardening

Capabilities

For added security consider limiting fail2ban capabilities by adding CapabilityBoundingSet under [Service] section of the systemd service file, e.g.:

CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_RAW

In the example above, CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH will allow fail2ban full read access, and CAP_NET_ADMIN and CAP_NET_RAW allow setting of firewall rules with iptables. Additional capabilities may be required, depending on your fail2ban configuration. See man capabilities for more info.

Filesystem Access

Also considering limiting file system read and write access, by using ReadOnlyDirectories and ReadWriteDirectories, again under the under [Service] section. For example:

In the example above, this limits the file system to read-only, except for /var/run/fail2ban for pid and socket files, and /var/spool/postfix/maildrop for postfix sendmail. Again, this will be dependent on you system configuration and fail2ban configuration. Note that adding /var/log is necessary if you want fail2ban to log its activity.

SSH jail

Edit /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf and modify the ssh-iptables section to enable it and configure the action.